Mineralogy

Mineralogy is the material science of naturally formed, mostly crystalline solids (minerals, rocks) covers also technical materials (glasses, raw materials) and, due to interaction with their environment, also fluids and gases. Depending on the focus, mineralogy is either part of Earth Sciences (environmental mineralogy, geochemistry, applied mineralogy) or part of chemistry (basic research, crystallography, material sciences).

Historically, mineralogy can be placed between mining, chemistry and physics, where the assessment, exploitation and processing of raw materials were of interest. A key point in the development of mineralogy was the improvement of analytical methods to explore equilibria between solids, melts and solutions. As a result mineralogy became the global science of the formation and evolution of rocks and of the distribution of chemical elements in the system Earth.

Today it is a material-oriented field of expertise, which investigates in the atomic structure, the physical and chemical parameters, and the conditions of formation, especially of solids. Here the main focus lies on process-orientated questions in the field of geological and material sciences, whereas mineralogy is closely linked to other natural sciences such as geology, geophysics, chemistry (e.g., solid-state chemistry, analytics, physical chemistry), and physics (e.g., nuclear physics, solid-state physics, metal physics, surface physics, magnetism, optics). Further connections can be made to the fields of biology and medicine (crystal structure investigations of biological objects and of mineralogical carrier of contaminants), as well as to astronomy and extraterrestrial physics, to chemical engineering, to mining and metallurgy, to data processing, and finally to archaeology (investigation of artefacts).